Fido over at The Inquirer reports look at this picture below, and note well that the memory banks, even running at 1120MHz are not covered at all while Nvidia cools its memory with passive heatsinks. Nvidia memory is clocked at 1100MHz so is very close to ATI.

Computerbase.de have a slide that shows Nvidia will launch a third card , just below the GeForce 6800 Ultra called the GeForce 6800 GT.

PCStats have thrown up an introduction to DDR-2 memory! Here's byte.

Spring is here and things are happening in the computer world. Already there are several technologies waiting for their promised turn in the spotlight, such as PCI-Express, the BTX form factor, and Intel's next set of chipsets for the Pentium 4. To these you can add DDR-2, an evolutionary upgrade to the current memory standard, DDR-SDRAM.

If your looking for a cheap nforce2 board? then look no further than this deal at Overclockers.co.uk

This Week Only we have the Sparkle mainboard featuring nForce2 400 chipset, which is a fantastic DDR400 single channel solution reduced to just £22.95 +VAT.

Their second exhibition - A bunch of pictures of casemod hardware.

http://hardwareoc.hu

Hexus.net takes a look at three Maxtor and one Freecom external hard disks in their latest roundup!

For a long time, external hard disks were more of a curiosity than something you could realistically add to your PC. If you've been in need of high performance from an external disk or disk array, you've had to spend a fortune on external SCSI, Fibre Channel or some other enterprise-level connection medium. High capacity has gone along with that high price requirement. So for realistic money, in the home or single user price range, you've been stuck with, erm, nothing really.

TBreak have a new article out that looks at the performance difference between the 32 and 64-bit version of Windows! Here's a snip.

One of the biggest advantages of the Athlon64 is, well, 64-bit computing. It will be quite a while until we see a complete shift to a 64-bit Operating System/Applications environment, however the process has started. Microsoft has already made a freely downloadable beta version of Windows XP-64 Bit Edition while drivers have also started appearing from the likes of nVidia, Creative, VIA and Silicon Image.

Few weeks ago Nvidia, one of the top two graphics card makers, announced its GeForce 6800 Ultra video card. It currently stands as the undefeated champion in the video card market with beating its previous predecessor GeForce FX5950 and ATi Radeon 9800XT cards.

CoolTechZone

The Firing Squad have posted part 2 of their 3D Performance with Far Cry article! using Nvidia's Flagship GPU the GeForce 6800 Ultra.

After further analysis with Far Cry, it turns out the game isn?t quite the technological tour de force we suggested in part 1 of our 3D Performance with Far Cry article. In that article, we highlighted the game?s use of 2.0 shaders, and while these shaders are used in the game, it turns out that they?re not used as extensively as we suggested. In fact, from what we can tell, Far Cry mainly uses 1.1 shaders to achieve the jaw-dropping visuals we discussed in the intro.

Our Bro's over DriverHeaven have thrown up some FarCry Benchmarks which were run on a GeForce 6800 Ultra! Here's a snip! LOL

In summary, forcing the R300 path if you have a 6800 Ultra is advisable as it gives you decent performance however better IQ than the standard path.

One other point of note is that the Radeon 9800XT is very close in performance to the 6800Ultra at the same IQ levels. Only 7fps in average framerates separate the cards which is a phenomenal result for the Radeon.

X-bit Labs have posted a detailed block diagram of Xbox 2's Xenon architecture which they got from the Chinese site GZeasy.com!

As everybody knows, there is a lot going on with multi-core, multi-threaded designs at IBM. Apparently, Microsoft also wants to jump on that bandwagon, some sources indicate. The Redmond, Washington-based firm wants to incorporate IBM?s POWER 976 architecture into the CPUs for Xbox 2 console to allow truly high-performance processing.

Stretch Inc announced on Monday of their S5000 chip which is the first processor that can add new instruction while operating. The chip combines an existing RISC (reduced instruction set computing) architecture with a large reconfigurable area of programmable logic called the Instruction Set Extension Fabric, ISEF. Stretch's own C/C++ compiler automatically spots areas in a program that require intensive computation and creates new instructions for the processor to handle those tasks on-the-fly. During a demo of the new chips performance, the chip was ran at 300Mhz but outperformed 2Ghz competitor chips. Banta said it takes far less time and money to develop products using the S5000 and major changes can be implemented via a software update.

I was a little upset this morning that there wasn't any new R420 information out since the rumors had the NDA being lifted today, so after I ranted a bit at Beyond3D and then went and ranted a bit more at Rage3D, I thought it might be a better idea to try ranting at ATi and seeing if that helped.

So I did, and Patti Mikula got back to me in about 2 minutes with some info.

Just spotted this bit of News over at [H]ardOCP

NVIDIA recently distributed SM3.0 Screenshots and they got a lot of you asking questions. What was NVIDIA trying to show us with the screenshots from the FarCry game engine? We examine these differences and tell the truth about SM3.0.

We come, we saw, we left - amidst tight security. We just returned from visiting nVidia at the Intel Solutions Summit 2004 in Sydney, Australia. There we saw GeForce 6800, PCI Express 16x and Intel Grantsdale and Tumwater in action with some type of mysterious 64-bit processor from Intel.

Nvnews have a new article out entitled Vertext Shader 3.0! Here's a snip.

A bit late to the party, but I have updated our GeForce 6800 Ultra preview with a new page that covers the features of Vertex Shader 3.0. My goal was to use the research material I assembled to present the information in a non-technical manner. But with the complexity surrounding GPUs, it is near impossible!

Elite Bastards reports following on from the image posted a few days ago we now have a second image of R420, showing a close-up of part of the board.

NVIDIA and VIA have dominated the enthusiast market for Athlon 64 chipsets, but they're not the only ones with core logic for AMD's latest processors. SiS has quietly been churning out the SiS755 chipset, which is seeing a lot of action in inexpensive Socket 754 boards from ECS, ASRock, and Foxconn. Can the chipset's features and performance keep up with its Athlon 64 competition? We tested a SiS755 board against VIA's K8T800 and NVIDIA's nForce3 150 and 250Gb chipsets to find out.

GamersDepot have a new article out called DX9 Gaming - Pixel Shader 3.0 and 32bit Precision - What's it all mean and who's right? in which they ask a few cutting-edge developers their opinions on Nvidia's new shader model 3.0! Here's a snip.

With so much bombardment of technology and features from ATI and NVIDIA, it has become a bigger challenge than ever before for consumers to decipher what?s relevant and what isn?t. In the past week or so, we?ve heard NVIDIA pitching Pixel Shader 3.0 as the next quantum leap in graphical prowess and how only 32bit precision is truly to be considered ?full precision?.

We?ve just published our most recent article which raises some questions on the quality produced by Nvidia's Geforce 6800 Ultra.

Before we begin it should be stated that these tests were performed using the Forceware 60.72 drivers, the version provided by Nvidia to all press reviewing their new card. These drivers are still beta however they have an interesting approval. The following text is taken from the Futuremark website: